Climate change's challenge to India

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Business and financial communities reacted with outright
euphoria to the recent landslide victory of India's
National Congress Party. Mumbai's stock
exchange soared. Foreign investment poured in. Pundits at what used to be known
as investment banks trumpeted the results as nothing less than India finally
throwing off the shackles that have held it back from greatness: the
limitations of a weak coalition government beholden to Communists. India, we are told, is free at last to embark on a project of wealth creation that the rest of the world will be hard-pressed to imitate.

India
is expected to recover smartly from the current global recession, hitting an annual economic growth
rate of 6.9 percent by
next year. Meanwhile, bearish economists are warning that
structural weaknesses will delay the recovery of the US economy until well into 2011. The
icing on this cake: General Motors is soothing investors rattled by its recent
bankruptcy in the United States
with the assurance that its India
operations will not be affected. Charles
Wilson, a former GM CEO, once quipped that "what's good for General Motors
is good for the country." That quaint, 20th century line now begs only one
question: which country? The world's financial press buzzes that India could be the "new China"; capital (at least some of it) is
stampeding from Shenzhen to Bangalore;
and the US dollar is in free-fall.
Mira Kamdar is a 2008 Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the Asia Society in New York and a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute.

After a few terms in the wilderness of coalition
dependencies, Congress has, to use a favorite euphemism of recessionary
America, "right sized" the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party down to a
mere hundred or so seats. It has utterly ham-strung the Left, which held onto a
mere 26 seats. Congress need no more worry about the Communists spoiling its
new friendship with the United States
or its own version of GM's old dictum: "what's good for India Inc. is good
for India."

Knowing that half the country's population - and most of
tomorrow's voters - is under the age of 25, Congress has put fresh faces in
ministries, including some in their twenties. Thirty-seven-year-old Rahul
Gandhi is the heralded heir apparent of the Congress dynasty that stretches
back to his great-grandfather, India's
founding prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. At 63 years of age, the Republic of India is young again.

The impending
supernova

What could possibly hold India back now? Surely Congress's substantial
mandate gives it the power to enact the bold policy measures India requires
to overcome the many obstacles in its path to greatness. The list is long: laughably poor infrastructure, desperate farmers committing
suicide in droves, peasants and so-called tribals or Adivasis dispossessed of
their lands by aggressive resource extraction and industrial expansion (and a
related Maoist
insurgency), overloaded cities, water shortages, energy deficits, high rates
of illiteracy, and a notoriously bad national health care system. Add to these a
wealth gap that has widened, not narrowed, in globalization's wake; the fact
that the majority of the world's malnourished children live in India; the fact
that, while 250,000 Indians may qualify as USD millionaires, 800 million live
on less than 2 US dollars per day.

As staggering as these challenges are, they pale in
comparison to the one supernova on track to blow them (along with the rest of
us) off the navigable charts of human reckoning: climate
change.

As every major report on climate change has alarmingly pointed out,
the impact of global warming will be most felt by developing countries. In a
final injustice of geography and imperial history, the world's developing
countries are by and large also the world's warmest and most densely
populated. Of all the emerging economies whose fortunes are rising, India is one of
the most vulnerable to climate change.

A weapon of mass
destruction

India
has one of the world's longest coastlines. Rising sea levels are already
swallowing up the Sunderbans
at the mouth of West Bengal's mighty Hooghly
River. Next door in Bangladesh, 15
percent of whose land mass will be under water if sea levels rise as predicted,
things are even worse. Little wonder India
is building a fence along its border with Bangladesh in anticipation of a
wave of climate-change refugees. At 4,000 kilometers in length, the
Indo-Bangladeshi Barrier will rival the Great Wall of
China. One can only imagine what rising sea levels will do to the
millions crammed onto reclaimed land in Mumbai or in India's
new auto manufacturing hub of Chennai, around which one trusts the government
of India
has no plans to build fences.

Climate change is also already causing the glaciers of the Himalayas
to melt at an alarming rate, the rivers they feed are receding. Some scientists
are predicting that the sacred Ganga, whose
waters have nourished the great grain-producing Gangetic plains as well as the souls of untold millions of Hindu faithful
through millennia, is in danger of simply drying up. Three billion people -
half the world's current population - depend on the Himalayas
for water. The impact of that water dwindling away is terrifying.

If temperatures rise in India by even a couple of degrees
Celsius, which they are already well on track to do, the very viability of food
plants will be threatened. Yields will plummet in plants simply not evolved to
thrive in higher temperatures. More immediately, climate change causes predictable weather patterns to become unpredictable. This
is not good news for a country where the vast majority of agricultural
production depends on the regular arrival, duration, and bounty of the monsoon rains. No wonder William Cline, in his meticulously researched book Global Warming and
Agriculture: Impact Estimates by Country (Center for Global Development
2007) projects that agricultural production in India will decline by as much as 38
percent over current levels by 2080 as a direct result of climate change alone.
By that year, India
will have added 450 million more people to its population.

Shifting priorities

Climate change is a weapon of mass destruction. Mitigating global warming by whatever means
necessary should be the new Indian government's priority number one.

The government should make a major push to develop low-cost
alternative energy technologies that don't require finite, toxic fuel sources
(which means both fossil and fissile energy sources).

It should help India's small-scale farmers return to the
cultivation of traditional hardy (and higher in protein) food plants such as
millet and buckwheat, and install low-cost, highly effective micro-irrigation
systems to get the biggest plant-growing benefit for every drop of precious
water.

It should require all new construction across the country to
be green construction, naturally cooler with little or no air conditioning, and
with roofs that collect and channel rain when during monsoons.

It should recognize that the infrastructure India so
desperately needs is green infrastructure that encourages public transportation
and the use of bicycles, a realization at long last sweeping cities in richer
nations.

India
cannot afford to do as the west did: get dirty to get rich, then start to think
about cleaning up the mess. It also cannot expect wealthier countries to push
the hardest to deal with climate change, the global menace that will devastate India
far more than it will them.

A new path

The new Congress-led government should hitch its strong mandate
to India's emerging economic power to force the west - sorely tempted by the
current economic crisis to ratchet down its efforts - to do the right thing and
pay for its share of not only reducing current carbon emissions, but accounting for
the carbon accumulated over centuries of western industrial expansion. It
should provide incentives to investors willing to put capital behind green
technology ventures, especially small-scale technologies quickly scalable among
India's
still largely poor population, and it should identify and support the untold number
of locally-adapted, grass-roots, inexpensive solutions that business is simply
never going to be interested in because they cannot be made into profit-making
ventures.

India has momentum and history on its side. The new government
should propose a new bilateral pact focused on climate change to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when she visits India
in July. And it should do so in a spirit
very different from that of the nuclear
deal where, at least on the US
side, billions of dollars in corporate profits and arms sales were major
drivers.

To grapple with climate change, a different approach is required. The
new Congress government needs to bring to this task the real spirit of "young
India", the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi
who warned decades ago that the "earth has enough to satisfy man's need but not
every man's greed."

A climate-change pact between the governments of two of the
world's great democracies should include agreement on bold commitments that
would anticipate real progress when the nations of the world gather in Copenhagen later this year to address this
rapidly worsening calamity. There is no better way for two nations so key to our collective survival to address the challenge that imperils us all. India must embrace a new path to equity and
sustainability, without which democracy will merely be one
casualty among many too terrible to imagine.